Spike in Readership

I am off this week, sort of, and slept till noon. It was very nice to just lay in bed. When I woke up I logged into my e-mail accounts and then checked the blog. Since yesterday I have seen ten times as many readers as normal. The number one post that people read was about Ms. Rothschild complaining about the Occupy movement. I have no idea why as no comments were left.

Now, to tell you the truth I don't really care who she is, I haven't been impressed by her articles or condescending approach. From the comments left on her article at Huffington post, a lot of people found her annoying. In the end, she misses the biggest point of all, how should society be organized so that we have a decent life for as many people as possible. That is what philosophers have questioned for thousands of years.

We have become a world of very educated people with some being very good at taking advantage of the system to benefit themselves at the expense of others. We do this on a national level and on a personal level. The idea was that someone should be compensated based on how much they contributed to society and that we should protect people who could not contribute. It was based on morality and not just money.

There are those who talk about the "job creators", okay what if we compensated people based on how many jobs they created rather than the value of a companies stock. That would change how CEOs operated (this is an example, it would not be as easy as it sounds).

Here is something to consider just for the fun of it. Many police departments were given stimulus money to "create jobs" and they used this money to hire police and buy supplies. Wouldn't it be nice to know how many jobs were created by the police buying pepper spray. Maybe the cop from Davis felt he was creating jobs by spraying the kids with pepper spray, I mean you have to use it up to justify buying more. Maybe the cop thought of himself as a job creator.

It sounds completely ridiculous because it is insanity. It takes the human element out of how our society is organized and should function; but, that is what happens when it stops being about people and is just about money. Hey, this may not be my best post ever; but, I am still drinking my first cup of coffee.

Ms. Rothschild offers nothing on how to improve the world, status quo seems quite alright with her; but, the status quo is failing at every level of society. The world has become bankrupt on an international, national and personal level because people have ceased believing in a greater morality than just personal gain.

U.C. Davis's chancellor is calling for a 30 day review of what happened and has put the two officers involved and the chief on administrative leave. That means they will be paid for not pepper spraying people, I mean working. It means that the Chancellor is now a job eliminator. I am okay with that, those officers need to find new jobs.

Now knowing a bit about politics, there are only so many ways that the investigation can end. Lets consider them. First, they find the officers guilty of abuse of power and fire them. Second, they find the officers guilty of overreacting or some nicely worded justification. If that happens the cops could stay at UC Davis where they will be under constant risk of whatever or they are transferred to another campus. If that happens then everyone at the new campus will feel they are being threatened. Perhaps the officers will be allowed to retire; but, one of them it said was relatively new.

Now another possibility is that the officers are not disciplined other than being sent for retraining or sensitivity training or whatever, that is not going to please anyone. Here is the problem, the investigation will not be about if the officers were guilty, it will be about finding a Public Relations answer, not about fixing what led to the situation.

As for the individual officers involved, I bet they are having a bad week. While the officers may not have thought anything of what they did at the time, I would hope that rather justifying it to themselves they would sit back and ask if what they did was morally right. I would hope they would ask them how they would have felt if it was their family that was pepper sprayed. At some point they will be interviewed and their answers will determine how people respond; but, true rehabilitation does not happen in a day. Maybe they will be given jobs in the prison system because so few care about how we treat prisoners, just consider the L.A. County jails problems.

I find it interesting that the governor and the mayor's have not said anything about what happened at the university. They don't have much to say because there is a good chance in their minds that we might need more pepper spray in order to stop the Occupy protests.